Friesen and Cressman - Kittlereducation

7/29/2019 Friesen and Cressman - Kittlereducation

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Media Theory, Education and the University: A Response to KittlersHistory of the University as a Media System

Dr. Norm Friesen & Darryl Cressman

February 2010

Abstract

As the means through which specialized and general knowledge and practice isreproduced in a society, education, and the university, are indelibly shaped by media.With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to re-think Kittlers (2004) history of theuniversity as a media system by emphasizing how media shape pedagogy. Kittler pointsto a variety of moments within the history of the university: Its initial formationalongside manuscript culture; the advent of the printing press; university reformcorresponding with liberalism and nationalism in the 17th & 18th centuries; and the era ofpsychometric study stretching from 1900 to the present. Referring to a variety of media

theorists, and tracing the development of forms of curricular organization andrepresentation, our paper develops a more detailed historical account of the function andcharacteristics of education in each of these academic media systems. In our conclusion,we provide a brief review Kittlers controversial diagnosis and prognosis of thecontemporary university, in the light of our own historical overview of pedagogicalmethods.


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Media Theory, Education and the University: A Response to KittlersHistory of the University as a Media System

Introduction: The University, Education & Media TheoryMedia and education have long been closely linked. Speaking of collective humaneducation, Rousseau claimed an almost exact correspondence between stages of socialdevelopment and modes of representation:

These three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stagesaccording to which one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting ofobjects is appropriate to a savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to abarbaric people; and the alphabet to civilized people. (1966, 17)

Developments in media technologies occurring more recently than cave paintings,hieroglyphs, or the phonetic alphabet have prompted similar epochal pronouncements.The computer and the Internet, we are told, will usher in a more civilized and advancedera for society as a whole as well as for education and the university. For enthusiasticproponents of a completely networked university, this means that the tasks such asstoring and retrieving books and of taking notes in the lecture hall will soon be history.The computer, together with digital networks, will render these familiar aspects ofuniversity education obsolete. For critics, the increasing computerization of theuniversity signals the death of 500 years of print-based education. The future, they fear,is one in which Wikipedia entries and Google search results will surpass the utility andlegitimacy of printed books and articles.

The strident positions of both the critics and enthusiasts in these debates ignorethe historical imbrication of education and media, parallel to the irreducibility ofeducation to its curricula. The university among the oldest continuously operatinginstitutions, east or westhas developed to its contemporary form in intimate

interrelationship with changing mediatic technologies for storing, producing anddisseminating knowledge. And this coevolution is certain to continue.

In 1986, German media theorist Friedrich Kittler pronounced that mediadetermine our situation, and so doing, makred the beginning of ways of understandingmedia, culture and education that have come to constitute a new, interdisciplinary fieldof study predominant in German-speaking Europe: Medienwissenschaften. W.J.T. Mitchelland Mark Hansen (2010) explicate Kittlers memorable declaration as follows:

Packed into Kittlers statement is a crucial claim: that media form theinfrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience andunderstanding. Like the strata of the seeable and sayable that, in French

philosopher Michel Foucaults archaeology of knowledge, make knowledgepossible in a given historical moment, media broker the giving of space and timewithin which concrete experience becomes possible. (vii)

According to this way of theorizing media, any presuppositions of the inherentuniversalism of the pursuit of knowledge are subject first to the quasi-transcendentalcondition of media. Knowledge, education, and the university are contingent upon theexistant media system or upong the prevailing mediatic conditions or mediality(Medialitt; Margreiter, 2006, 63-67) such that any changes within this media system


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result in changes in education and knowledge: how it is pursued, produced, stored,disseminated and reproduced within and among institutions.

The relationship between changing mediatic and educational forms isunderdeveloped in both educational and media research. In this respect, FriedrichKittlers discussion of learning to read in his Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990), andparticularly his history of the university as a changing media system in Universities:

Wet, Hard, Soft and Harder (2004), are distinctive and original. Working backwardsfrom categories representative of contemporary computer systems and technologies(such as hardware, software, or their human wetware), Kittler describes variousepochs of the university and also of scholarly and literary output as constitutingdiscursive or inscriptional systems or networks;

network[s] of technologies and institutions allow a given culture to select,store, and produce relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and theinstitutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted ahistorically very powerful formation (1990, 369)

Changes in these mediatic networks associated for example with the inventionof the printing press, the rise of a reading public, and later the emergence of telegraph,film, gramophone and typewriterare accompanied by corresponding changes in theculture of education and also in the university and its practical and institutionalconfigurations and functions.

Yet, there is something missing from both Kittlers (2004) history of theuniversity as a media system and his diagnosis and prognosis of the contemporaryuniversity: the role of education, pedagogy or the practices of teaching and learning. Thelink between media, what is being taught, and how is it being taught is largelyunrecognized.1 As the means through which specialized and general knowledge andpractice is reproduced in a society, education, and the university, are indelibly shaped by

media. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to re-think Kittlers (2004) historyof the university as a media system by emphasizing how media shape pedagogy. Kittlerpoints to a variety of moments within the history of the university: Its initial formationalongside manuscript culture; the advent of the printing press; university reformcorresponding with liberalism and nationalism in the 17th & 18th centuries; and the eraof psychometric study stretching from 1900 to the present. Referring to a variety ofmedia theorists, and tracing the development of forms of curricular organization andrepresentation, our paper develops a more detailed historical account of the function andcharacteristics of education in each of these academic media systems. In our conclusion,we provide a brief review Kittlers controversial diagnosis and prognosis of thecontemporary university, in the light of our own historical overview of pedagogicalmethods.

Kittler and German Media TheoryKittler is only one of the earliest of a succession of theorists and philosophers

(Wissenschaftler) of media in German-speaking Europe. Others in this first generation

1Although it is little recognized in educational research, Kittler provides detailed and original treatment

of pedagogical understandings and techniques of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the first twochapters of his Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (1990). Despite the fact that Kittler does not focus specificallyon the university in these chapters, they will be discussed in this connection later in this paper.


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include Norbert Bolz (e.g., 1999), Ludwig Pfeiffer and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (e.g.Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994). In North America, Kittlers work has sometimes beenunderstood to be the continuation of insights provided by media theorists from Canadaand the USA (Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Harold Innis, Elizabeth Eisenstein,Joshua Meyrowitz). In their original German context, contemporary Medienwissenschaftenappear as broadly poststructuralist studies of technological culture, and much more as a

successor to German literary studies and theory than to the critical sociology of theFrankfurt School. One of the principle interpreters of this movement to English-languageaudiences, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, cautiously characterizes the current post-Kittlerian generation ofMedienwissenschaftlerby emphasizing largely what they are not.This generation, he says, represents at best a motley crew of media-theoreticalparadigms that pit incommensurable basic approaches against each other marked by aconspicuous absence ofhegemonic approaches [or] alpha theories (2006, 89). At thesame time, Winthrop-Young admits that these theorists share some commonalitiesfollowing from Kittler himself, and from poststructuralist inquiry into the technicalconditions that make knowledge possible in a given historical moment (cf. Mitchelland Hansen):

Nevertheless they [current media theorists] do share to a greater or lesser degreesome basic assumptions that are most clearly evident in Kittler's work, amongthem a tendency to fuse aspects of French poststructuralism with an increasinglytechnologically informed focus on the materialities of communication... [and] ahostility toward subject- and/or consensus-oriented philosophical andsociological approaches... (2002, 828)

Along with the influence of the French poststructuralists, most notably Foucault,these theorists also share a keen interest in historical configurations and precedents,undertaking intensive archaeological investigations of developments (for example) in

radio, postal and typewritten media. And like the French post-structuralist analyses thatpreceded them, these investigations are typically performed as histories of the longuedure, focusing on periods of epochal and mediatic stability and the caesura thatpunctuate them.

Kittlers historiography is also emphatically epochal, tracing four long periods ofstability, and the disruptions that separate them. As indicated above, Kittler begins withmedieval manuscript culture, progresses via the Renaissance through to 1800(Enlightenment, Romanticism) and finally, arrives at the period stretching from 1900 tothe present (the epoch of psychophysics or physiological psychology). Kittlerscoverage of these four stages follows a broadly Hegelian narrative of original mediatic,systematic and disciplinary unity, followed by an extended period of growing alienation

and contradiction among these elements, and ending with the promise of a reconstitutedmediatic and disciplinary unity. This unity, according to Kittler, is enabled by theuniversality of the computer and Internet as devices for generation reproduction anddissemination:

Universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a complete mediasystem. Turings universal machine vulgo the computer processes, stores, andtransmits whatever data it receives, whether textbooks, measurements, oralgebras. Computers, therefore, have come full circle; from the mathematics


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departments where they once began, making their way through physics,chemistry, and medicine, they have finally arrived in the humanities. For thesecond time in its eight centuries, the university is technically uniform simplybecause all departments share one and the same hardware (2004, 249-250).

Kittler imagines a truly interdisciplinary university in which humanities topics are

[defined in terms of] cultural technologies [with] nothing nontechnical to teach andresearch, and in which science, math and engineering correspondingly give explicitconsideration to the cultural contexts of proofs, experiments and hypotheses (251).The long-standing split between science and the humanities that has characterized theuniversity can be corrected, according to Kittler, when we recognize that the basis ofthis split was mediatic in nature. The future of the university depends on its faculty tounite the separated notation system of alphabets and mathematical symbols into asuperset (252). After centuries of the contest of the faculties and of a split betweenheterogeneous media germane to the pursuits of each the university is seen as currentlyoccupying a moment of enormous promise.

The Manuscript Era: 1100-1500The university as an independent institution, upon its appearance in Europe in the 12thcentury, represented a complete media system in the sense that oral and written meansof processing and reproduction were all of a kind, and proper to the university itself. Thebasis of the medieval university was its library of Latin manuscripts which wereinherited from monasteries and cathedral schools. This information needed not only tobe stored, but also to be subject to processes of recording, transmission and processing.Professors proceeded to explain ancient manuscripts; students, by writing these oralcommentaries between the lines of their textbooks, did the interpretatio (245).Transmission of information, according to Kittler, was accomplished via an informalpostal system linking universities. As mentioned earlier, Kittler works backwards from

categories derived from contemporary computer and systems science, and thus describesthe early incarnation of the university as a three-fold hardware system which mirroredthe functions enabled by todays computers,

the data-processing lecture, the data-storing university library, and the data-transmitting mail enabled a cumulative and recursive production of knowledgefor almost three centuriesbefore Gutenbergs invention of the printing press(245-246).

Education or instruction is endogeneous to the medieval university mediaticsystem. This is not discussed explicitly by Kittler, but is registered clearly in MarshallMcLuhans (1962) comments concerning writing in the medieval university. Theteaching of writing, McLuhan explains, was accomplished through dictation andtranscription, an educational method that was directly related to the production andconsumption of manuscripts themselves:

There can be no doubt that one of the essential reasons for the custom ofdictation finds its explanation in the fact that, before the era of printing, schoolsand scholars had no adequate supply of texts. A manuscript book cost too much;the simplest way of getting them was for the teacher to dictate the texts to hispupil. (McLuhan, 1962, 95-96)


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A necessary complement to Kittlers discussion of the medieval university,then, is an understanding of the educational process as simultaneously a form ofrecording, processing and of mediatic production: the rise of the universities broughtmasters and students into the field of book production in class time, and these booksfound their way back to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing

their studies (1962, 134). McLuhan goes on to explain that what was being dictated washardly uniform, as in many cases instructors strove to give to the matter taught a newform suited to its own assumptions[The instructor] mostly dictated to his students theresults of these personal insights (1962, 97). Instruction thus involved a form ofprocessing in addition to processes of data backup or reproduction. This type ofinstruction, in turn, highlights another way in which knowledge was made possible inthe historical moment of medieval university. The integration and interdependence ofpedagogy and the mediatic system here is total: one is inconceivable without the other.The division that exists today between media (re)production, consumption and storageon the one hand, and education and instruction on the other, as we shall show, has a longhistory. But this history begins only afterthe transformation of the university through the

introduction of the printing press.

1500-1800: The Printed Book, Universities & Ramean Method

For Kittler, two events changed the medieval university media system: The adventof Gutenbergs printing press and the emergence of unified European nation-states. Theformer would, over the period of 300 years, come to shape the latter so that by the time ofthe French Revolution, many universities in Germany and France (the two mostsuccessful and often copied models of higher studies [Kittler, 2004, 249]) wereconstructed as mere appendages of the state. The equilibrium of the medieval mediatic

system of reproduction, storage, processing and transmission was upset when statesbegan building libraries of their own which devalued and subverted the monopoly of themedieval university libraries (2004, p.247). The legitimacy of the teacher, lecturer orreader as a kind of processor and reproducer of information was also put into question.In a world in which books were becoming relatively cheap and plentiful, he was nolonger an unrivaled source and master of information and learning:

Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order tolearn a language or academic skill. Instead, they could swiftly achieve mastery ontheir own, even by sneaking books past their tutors as did the young would-beastronomer, Tycho Brahe (Eisenstein 2005, p.38).

The academy as a unified mediatic system was also undermined by the emergence ofscientific and technical disciplines that operated in relative autonomy from the midievaltrivium. This development, too, finds its origin in the appearance of new mediatic formsand technologies, specifically the precise and readily-reproducible combination of text,graphics and specialized forms of notation enabled by the printing press. Kittler notesthat the combination of type and woodcut or copperplate enabled scientificvisualization at a level of precision unheard of by Greeks and monks (2004, 248).Elizabeth Eisenstein explains further:


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The fact that identical images, maps, and diagrams could be viewedsimultaneously by scattered readers constituted a kind of communicationsrevolution in itselfFor scholars concerned with scientific change, whathappened to numbers and equations is surely as significant as what happened toeither images or words (Eisenstein, 2005, 14, 26).

The pictorial communications revolution was important not only for scientificprogress, but for developments in education as well. Among the most important of theseare developments closely associated with the educational reforms of Peter Ramus (1515-1572). (The fact that Kittler avoids mention of Ramus is testament to the marginalizationof education within his media history of the university.)

Ramus was an educator and educational reformer who devised what becameknown as the Ramean method of instruction. Formulated in opposition to classicalauthorities (above all Aristotle and Cicero), this method was widely seen as providing asingle efficient means of representation and organization through which one could learnall that there is to know. In making this contribution, Ramus prefigured or originated arange of pedagogical notions that are today taken for granted, such as the importance of a

lesson, the structure of a curriculum and, of course, the necessity of an educationalmethod. His educational reforms dominated the teaching practices of Europeanschoolmasters [d]uring the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and wereparticularly influential in New England. (Triche & McKnight, 2004, 41). Speaking evenmore broadly, media historian Walter Ong points out that before Ramuss pedagogicalinnovation, there was no word in ordinary usage which clearly expressed what we meantoday by method, a series of orderly steps gone through to produce with certainefficiency a desired effect (Ong 1958, 225).

Ramuss method can be thought of as a particularly mechanistic type of literaryempiricism (1971, 171) in which texts and their arguments are broken down into isolatedterms and concepts which are then placed visually into interrelationship according to

rules of precedence and antecedence. The literary text becomes for a Ramist a kind ofuninspired collection of miscellaneous details to be analyzed and taxonomized (Tricheand McKnight, 40). Quoting a 1992 study of Ramuss attack on Cicero, the same authorsgo on to explain:

Ramus proposed that unclear and confused arguments could be understood onlyby organizing all parts into an orderly progression moving from antecedent toconsequence. Ramuss method of arrangement accomplished this by organizing anargument so that the chief matter is placed at the beginning, is arranged accordingto whether it is simple or complex, and then is argued and brought to aconclusion. (40)

Ramus achieved this order and organization by leveraging possibilities for diagrammaticprocessing and transmission that had not been available to the likes of Cicero andAristotle. Terms and concepts extracted from texts were arranged and presented in aspatialized, diagrammatic form, in a figure known as Ramean or binary tree. (Figure 1shows a Ramean dialectic of Philosophy that diagrams the interrelationship of thevarious arts; the computational connotations of the term binary are not entirelyaccidental, as we shall see.)


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Figure 1: Table of the Arts (from: Thomas FreigiusProfessio Regia (Basel1567).

Quoting another recent study of Ramuss work and influence, Triche and McKnightexplain:

As a diagram of dichotomized concepts, Ramuss method could be used to presentany subject as a visually represented structure that reduced knowledge to thebifurcated spatial patterns of a branching taxonomy by setting out the wholesubject on a single side of paper, a student would be able to see the subject as a[single] whole. This visual and graphic process certainly gave the teacher greatercontrol over what subject matter would be handled and mastered. (2004, 47-48)

The reduction of a text, in all of its ambiguity and complexity, to one of thesebranching trees was constitutive of Ramean method. To subject a text to such areductive analysis, to process it in this way, was to effectively methodize it. As Ongputs it, words which admit of neat diagrammatic or semidiagrammatic presentation arethose which are methodized properly (1971, 185). And the significance of suchmethodization, indeed of a more general methodized and spatialized psychology could,as Ong explains, only be realized in the context of new typographical print technologies:

In principle, every subject properly treated by a Ramist admitted of beingdiagrammed on bracketed, dichotomized outlines[But] while such outlines are

not unknown in the pretypographical manuscript tradition, in this tradition theydo not admit of the ready multiplication which printing makes possible. Inmanuscripts, diagrams are much more laborious productions than straight text, formanuscript copying only with great difficulty controls the position of material onthe page. Typographical reproduction controls it automatically and inevitably.Ramist method is psychologically of a piece with typographical reproduction.(Ong, 1971, 168-169)


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It is important that Ramuss method points to the conceptualization of pedagogyitself as a question of technique, as a matter of optimized efficiency, that has flourishedfrom 1900 to the present day.2 This is not to say, however, that present forms andsystems follow directly or unproblematically from Ramean method. It is distinctlypremodern in its claims to disciplinary universality (being applicable to any subject)and admits of none of textual ambiguity that was constitutive of the culturally self-aware

hermeneutic man of 1800 and of his natural grounding in maternal orality.

1800: The Mothers Mouth and the Hermeneutic ManThe late eighteenth century marks the coincidence of a number of developments

significant enough to warrant the label of pedagogical century for the period as a whole(Gudjons, 2008, 81). Pedagogy came into its own at this time specifically as aGeisteswissenschaft, literally as a science of the spirit implying, of course, its fullseparation from the natural and technical sciences. According to Kittler, this ascendancyof pedagogy as a humanities subject coincided with strengthened interest on the partof the state in the development of specialized training for bureaucrats, civil servants, andother governmental employees particularly teachers and professors. Both Napoleon and

Frederick the Great, Kittler explains, redefined the pedagogical and political role ofhigher education in France and Prussia by connecting it very explicitly to the functionsof the state:

In Francenew coles Normales, by teaching future teachers, enabled Napoleonto procure a new elite of bureaucrats. In Prussia, the king made academicprofessors and high school teachers civil servants [Beamte], so that a dramaticallymodernized philosophical faculty could invent - by dialogic seminars andhermeneutic lectures - the so-called unity ofForschung und Lehre (teaching andresearch) that then fed back from universities to the gymnasia, from philosophyto literary studies. (2004, 248)

As is the case with many assertions in Kittlers Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, andHarder, these two sentences can be readily expanded into a paragraph, passage orindeed, an entire chapter. In fact, Kittler provides precisely this kind of expansion andexplication in the first two chapters of his Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990) and thesewill be used to explore the pedagogical implications of his assertions here.

For example in the chapter The Mothers Mouth, Kittler describes thedevelopment of a new class of educated universal bureaucrat as part of a new model ofthe state. In France, this bureaucratic class developed in the context of Napoleonicreforms and consolidation; and in Germany, it was situated in the emergence of thePrussian Kulturstaat. This was a state in which cultural production was seenas the

major cohesive factor in the face of political fragmentation (Winthrop-Young, 2006, 90).Correspondingly, members of this educated civil servant class were seen as advocatesand agents of national cultural achievement and unity, rather than as mere cogs in animpersonal administrative apparatus. These cultural servants were described at the time

2 It also provided the dialectical (logical) preconditions underlying the subsequent refinements to

method propagated by both Francis Bacon and Renee Descartes (among others),whom curriculumtheorists believed to have supplied the foundational scientific and philosophical concepts of methodappropriated by modern pedagogues and curricularists. (Triche and McKnight, 41)


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as instructors of mankind or education officers (Erziehungsbeamte), and were chargedwith nothing less than improving the inner condition of man (Kittler, 59).3

In the pedagogical system or network of 1800, these state-sponsored agents ofinner improvement and cultural unification were considered the end product of a carefulprocess of education, formation or Bildung. This education, as Kittler has alreadyindicated, is one involving dialog and hermeneutics, and it is achieved through the

unification of teaching and research on an institutional level. Kittler here is referring totwo significant developments in the German university (and later on an internationallevel): the hermeneutic seminar (e.g., Clark, 1989) on the one hand, and the Humboldtmodel of the university (e.g., Albritton, 2006) on the other. We consider each in turn.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Prussian civil servant, was chosen in 1809 tostrengthen and elevate the nation by removing the burdens weighing on it and alsothrough education (Diesterweg, as quoted in Hohendorf, 2001, 5). To this end,Humboldt combined the humanistic pedagogy of the Swiss educator Johann HeinrichPestalozzi (who worked with poor children and mothers) together with the principle ofthe unity of teaching and research, and with an emphatic affirmation of universitysinstitutional autonomy. Theorizing along idealist-Hegelian lines, Humboldt saw the

potential for discovery of the inner subjective life and the outer objective world as beinginfinite. He envisioned the university as reflecting unending process of discovery:

In the organization of institutions of higher education everything depends uponretaining the principle that knowledge must be considered as something not yetwholly discovered and never entirely discoverable, and that it must incessantly besought as such. (Humboldt, as quoted in Albritton, 2006, 3)

When this institutionally-grounded, incessant seeking is directed inwards, itbecomes hermeneutic. This endless exploration of the unknown world, of the innerpowers [that] define the true essence of the individual (Humboldt, as quoted in Lth,

1997, p. 50) has its institutional correlative in Kittlers second point, above: The dialogicseminars and hermeneutic lectures. These have been portrayed by other historians ofeducation as part of a genuine epistemic shift one tantamount to the emergence of anew pedagogic arena, and ultimately the father[ing of a] new man (Hoskin, 1993,280, 284).

This development occurred through the combination of a number of new genresand mediatic forms and processes, including the student essay or research paper, theresearch seminar, and the replacement of recitation and disputation (vestiges of themedieval dictation and oral performance) with dialogue and individual interpretation(Hoskin, 1993, 282) As the art of interpretation, hermeneutics understands theauthority of a text in ways that are rather different from the anonymous and timeless

authorization of the medieval manuscript, or the renaissance valourization of the printedworld. The terms of hermeneutic authorization are subjective, concerning theintentionality of the author, and are at the same time objective, concerning the work as awhole and its historical context. Hermeneutics is generally conceived of as a cyclicalprocess objective to subjective, part to whole carried out through a figurativedialogue with the text, its time, its underlying authorial intentions. Also important arethe texts implications in terms of philosophical anthropology as a study of its

3To the present day, university professors and upper-level school teachers work in Germany as directemployees of the state.


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human characteristics that remains important in Germany to the present day. In apaper entitled Education and the Genesis of Disciplinarity (1993), Hoskin describes theemergence of this kind of education as a transform[ation of] the kind of knowledge[that students] produced, as they internalized a new hermeneutic approach to thecritical reading of texts (283). Such a hermeneutics, Kittler stresses, ultimatelyprovided the interpretive techniques [to] refer interwoven words to a single and

universal man (Kittler 1990, 159):

the reflexively aware practitioner of hermeneutics, who reads writing as traceand the "objective" as the problematic production of subjectivity, and whothus discovers a meaning that constantly recedes [He] eventually finds thatthe truth thus written leads always back toward one's own self and thehermeneutics of the world within. (Hoskin, 1993, 276)

This type of man, willing to engage in the hermeneutic circle between objectiveproduction outside and the subjective world within, was apparently needed not onlyin Germany, but also in America, where the Humboldt institutional model was

emulated by a number of prominent universities, including the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago.It is important to note that diagrammatic and visual components are of little

epistemological value in charting this inner hermeneutic world. Letters, ciphers, anddiagrams in their threefold combination, Kittler explains, proved too alien forhumanists (2004, 248). The world within, unsurprisingly, is best sounded outthrough the multivocality of poetic words, rather than mapped with cartographicvisuals. While further underscoring the separation between natural sciences and theGeisteswissenschaften (including pedagogy), it is significant that the visual was notcompletely devalued in humanistic pursuits. It has an important aesthetic, expressiverole to play, specifically when it comes to matters sublime, where language and

hermeneutics reach their limits.The significance of graphical illustration is demonstrated via a criticalcomponent in the system of textually-based, hermeneutically-focused pedagogy thatof the feminine, or more specifically, the mother (Figure 2). Again inspired by thepedagogy of Pestalozzi, the period around 1800 in Germany (and around 1880 inAmerica) witnessed the publication of numerous instructional books for mothers,offering nursery rhymes or Koselieder(literally caressing songs) to be sung tochildren, to strengthen their verbal ability, their knowledge of the alphabet andultimately their literacy skills.


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Figure 2: Mother Love, Mother Play & MotherSong; cover illustration from instructional book formothers by Friedrich Frbel, published in Boston in

1896.

By providing oral instruction that leads to textual competencies, the mothereffectively completes the circuit constitutive of the discourse network of 1900. Kittlerexplains that maternal instruction presents the means by which nature can be seen asaccomplish[ing] a production of discourses through a kind of dissimulated primaryorality (1990, 25). The mother would read about the education of children via songs,games and other techniques. Through her elementary and oral dispensation, the motherwould then lead the child from natural sounds to language, and from there to thealphabet (1990, 31). This would then complete the illusion that the child received hislinguistic and literary ability from the wellsprings of a natural orality. The discoursenetwork of 1800, despite its thoroughly typographical components, could then be seen asgrounded in an emphatically natural source:

A simple and direct shortcircuit characterized pedagogical discourse.Educational tracts and primers written explicitly for mothers obliterated theirown textuality for the sake of their addressees. Books disappeared in a MothersMouth whose original self-exploratory experience had been instituted by thosevery books. (1990, 53)

The result of this elaborate disappearing act, as Kittler describes, is a malebrotherhood of educational bureaucrats (1990, 170) formed through the instructional


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deeds of the mother. And such a fully-formed (gebildet) new bureaucratic man iscapable of invok[ing] the feminine producer of discourse not as a tangible reality,but only as a thoroughly constructed ideal (Kittler 1990, 171, 170): DasUnbeschreibliche, Hier ist's getan;Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.4

Education 1900: Pedagogy as Psychophysical Technique

Education was changing decisively by the end of the 19th century, and perhapsnowhere more decisively than in America. Approaches referred to as physiologicalpsychology and psychophysics appeared simultaneously in Europe and America at thistime. However, whereas the influence of these new psychologies on pedagogy inGermany has been limited, in America it has been irrevocable. In Germany, Bildungremains a matter of practical interest, whereas in America, comprehensive attempts tocast education as a natural science continue to this day. Kittler explains what is atstake in this sudden, simultaneous development:

The victory of psychophysics is a paradigm shift. Instead of the classical question

of what people would be capable of if they were adequately and affectionatelycultivated [gebildet] one asks what people have always been capable of whenautonomic functions are singly and thoroughly tested The discourse network of1900 was the first to establish a treasury of the signifiers [for such testing] whoserules were entirely based on randomness and combinatorics (1990, 214, 210)

Kittler provides compelling evidence for this by recounting the studies of theautonomic memory function carried out by the German psychologist HermannEbbinghaus. Ebbinghaus research work focused on the measurement of his own memorycapacity, studied singly and thoroughly as an isolated, physiological function. Inspiredby earlier studies of the Elements of Psychophysics by Gustav Fechner, Ebbinghaus began his

tests of his own memory capacity by first using the text of Byrons Don Juan (Hoffman etal, 1986, 72). However, he became concerned at the lack of homogeneity in this text.Ebbinghaus wanted to ensure that the associative power of its meanings and themnemonic strength of its cadences would not limit the validity of his findings (Hoffmanet al, 1986, 59). Consequently, he elected instead to memorize sequences of terms wordslike fud lof or zof carefully combined to avoid any semblance of meaning andmetre. It is from studies based on these terms that Ebbinghaus developed his finding ofthe forgetting curve, an exponential curve tracing the decline of memory over time. Theintegrity of a nonsense sequence committed to memory, in short, declines by half overregular intervals (days or weeks).

During 1900 in America, a similar exponential curve was discovered to describefindings of a set of experiments very reminiscent of those of Ebbinghaus. The curve wasdescribed not as one of forgetting but ofpractice, and was produced in the research of

4The indescribable, here it is done / The Eternal Feminine draws us on. The last lines from GoethesFaust Part II, Walter Arndts translation of Faust, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,1976), p. 308.


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educational psychologist Edward L. Thorndike.5 The manner in which Thorndikereduced questions of education to a single autonomic function to produce these findingsis in some ways more radical than Ebbinghaus. Instead of eliminating subjectiveassociations of meaning and cadence, Thorndike removes the human subject itself replacing it with the autonomic functions as these can be studied first of all in animals. Inthe inaugural edition of the journal Educational Psychology, Thorndike declares that

Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals addingas if an afterthought including man (1910, 5). In his groundbreaking dissertationresearch on animal intelligence, Thorndike confined with cats, dogs and other animals tohis puzzle boxes, timing their repeated attempts to access food by pressing on a leveror pulling on rope. From this, he established the first of a number of his laws of learning(Thorndike, 1911, 244-245). This law states that [responses] accompanied or closelyfollowed by satisfaction to [an] animal will, other things being equal, be more firmlyconnected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur(1911, 244).

Human and animal are subject to this same law, and recurrence here is key.Thorndike used the animals confinement as a recurring situation, defining it as a

function or variable directly related to the rapidity of the animals response. Ultimately,these variables of repetition and rapidity were seen to apply to more complex taskscarried out by human animals as well. In Education: A First Book (1912) Thorndike refers tostudies of practice at typewriting by the sight method and reading and tapping outthe telegraphic language (106, 107) to illustrate how the same exponential relation holdsfor recurrences and rapidity of response (figure 3). Recurrence in this case takes the formof hours or weeks of practice, and rapidity of response corresponds to letters or strokesper minute.

[Figure 3: Curves of practice for sending and receiving telegraphic messages (left) and for two individualsin typewriting by the sight method (right).]

A number of important elements of the contemporaneous configuration ofeducation and mediation coincide in these curves of practice. First, as measures, thesecurves are based on capabilities (typing and sending and receiving telegraphic messages)

that are clearly secondary or tertiary to competencies central in conventional education(e.g. reading, writing, mathematics). But because letters per minute and strokes perminute can be accurately quantified at discrete points in time, these performances serveas a measure for education or learning in a much more general sense. In the age ofpsychophysics, as Kittler observes, a subordinate mental function becomes the mostfundamental [simply] because it is quantifiable (1990, 208).

5Ebbinghaus is credited as the first to describe the exponential relationship between learning and timethat was later referred to as the learning curve; Thorndike made it one of the foundations of a psychologyof education from his 1898 dissertation onwards.


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Second, there is the conspicuous role of the typewriter and telegraph in thesemeasures. These (contemporaneously) new media are used by Thorndike in a mannersimilar to Ebbinghauss use of nonsense syllable sequences. Both allow for an objective,repeatable quantification of performance in terms of their combinatory and aleatorycharacteristics, and through the deliberate exclusion of questions of meaning and metre.As media, both telegraph and typewriter have the same ultimate effect of replacing

elements constitutive of the subject elements such as meaning, the writing hand andthe writing bodyand replacing them with something as arbitrary as the spacesbetween elements in a system (Kittler, 1999, 15). These include, of course, the spacesseparating letters on a keyboard, or spaces between ciphers transmitted along atelegraph line. Writing thus ceases to be the expression of individuals the trace ofbodies or the consequence of their intentionality, and becomes instead the result offormulaic forms, differences and frequencies (Kittler, 1999, 16).

Thirdly, Thorndikes curves of practice illustrate the function of graphical andvisual representations in the era of psychophysics one very different from their role inthe discourse network of 1800. Images no longer accompany a text to provide aestheticillumination, or to intimate that which lies beyond verbal description. Instead,

Thorndikes charts delimit in a manner deliberately eschewing decoration andambiguitythe simple but universal truth of the relationship that connectsperformance and time: the former increases as a logarithmic function of the latter. Thecertainty and universality of the truth thus communicated is similar to that schematizedin the binary trees of Petrus Ramus. Neither delimit truths that recede ever more deeplyinto the obscurity of an inner world. Instead, the truths presented in both are manifestlyovert, capable of being communicated exhaustively through collections of discrete datapoints.

Finally, these curves of practice and forgetting are illustrative of educationconfigured in ways that anticipate Kittlers (2004) vision of the mediatic reunification ofthe faculties and activities of the university. Understood as the relationship between two

(or more) experimental variables, education is no longer separate from natural science;psychology as the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals, includingman provides the basis in the form of a series of indubitable lawsfor thedeployment of pedagogy as pure technique. Education, as Thorndike himself argues,becomes the handmaiden of experimental psychology: To an understanding of thematerial of education, Thorndike states, psychology is the chief contributor (1910, 6).Pedagogy thus becomes a question of creating conditions that are causally related todesired results:

Any problem of education may be put in the form: Given a certain desired changein a man, what situation shall we create to produce it, either directly or by theresponse which it provokes from him? (1912, 55-56).

Education no longer has any relation to subjectivity and interiority; as Kittler says, thereis no universal norm (inwardness, creative imagination) transcending the particularfunctions (2004, 214) whose efficiency are now to be maximized through education.6

6Elsewhere, Kittler explains the relationship between physiological studies and subjectivity as follows:The hard science of physiology did away with the psychological conception that guaranteed humans thatthey could find their souls through handwriting and rereading. The "I think," which since Kant becameobsolete as soon as body and soul advanced to become objects of scientific experiments. The unity of


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Education instead becomes a set of techniques for producing desired changes orresponses and such changes or responses, by definition, are those which can bequantified as readily and reliably as possible. As Kittler has already been quoted : If andwhen the old humanities deal not with man, their topics are cultural technologies suchas writing, reading, counting, singing, dancing, drawing (2004, 251). And as another oldhumanities subject, for the case of education, we might well add to Kittlers list the

cultural technologies of typing, telegraphy, and other mediatic contexts of physiologicalperformance.

Conclusion: The University made Whole?As indicated above, the mediatic paradigm shift represented by the victory ofpsychophysics on both sides of the Atlantic has the effect of setting the university backon the path to integration on the disciplinary level. Far from being a Geisteswissenschaft,education has been redefined as a learning science: the study of the internalmechanisms that govern learning across ages and settings (Bransford et al, 2000, 212). Asimilar reunification is evident on the mediatic level as well; and this is illustrated(again) in the use of typewriter and telegraph as examples for Thorndikes curves of

practice. If the typewriter, as McLuhan writes, fuses composition and publication(1964, 260) then the telegraph can similarly be said to combine dissemination withmediatic encoding and decoding functions. In the case of both telegraph and typewriter,the pedagogical process (i.e. the exercise of techniques of practice to increaseperformance) is reinscribed into a discourse network of composition, encoding, decodingand dissemination. The student, in other words, is re-installed as a producer andtransmitter in a media system, rather than having this production confined to anacademic arena of the seminar. The student is reintegrated into a position similar to theone he occupied in the pre-Gutenberg university. He is again placed into the field ofbook [and information] production in class time, to quote McLuhans description of themedieval student. But instead of functioning as a copying machine at almost no cost

(Kittler 2004, 252), the present-day student is reinstalled particularly with newer Webtechnologiesas a generator and processor of content, writing their own public blogpostings or contributing (in an editorial or other capacity) to the open source knowledgerepositories such as Wikipedia.

If the medieval students work as a kind of low-cost copying machine placedhim in a cloistered scriptorium, then the current mediatic conditions necessitate acomparable confinement for the contemporary student. If education is a question, asThorndike says, of techniques that would produce desired changes in either human oranimal, the student is then best situated where these techniques can be most carefullycontrolled. Although Thorndike (unlike B.F. Skinner) stopped short of adapting hisanimal puzzle boxes for human use, he presciently understood the role that technology

could play in realizing a pedagogy reduced to pure technique:If, by a miracle of mechanical ingenuity, a book could be so arranged that only tohim who had done what was directed on page one would page two becomevisible, and so on, much that now requires personal instruction could be managedby print. (Thorndike, 1912, 165)

apperception disintegrated into a large number of subroutines, which, as such, physiologists could localizein different centers of the brain and engineers could reconstruct in multiple machines (1999, 16).


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This miracle of mechanical ingenuity one that would closely control a studentsprogress based on their performance was realized first in Sydney Presseys machine fordrill and practice, and later in B.F. Skinners teaching machine. In each case, thestudent is positioned in front of a machine an instrument sometimes compared to atypewriterplaced on the desk before him or her. The student would scroll through andanswer questions, with each answer being recorded, and serving as a basis for controlling

the students subsequent interaction with the machine. Still later, digital technologiesallowed even more elaborate means of controlling the situation of the student often bymeans of sophisticated branching structures effectively representing executableRamean trees. In these scenarios, the computer (or other device) presents a means forcarefully controlling conditions presented to the student as surely as any cage or puzzlebox.

The mediatic reintegration of the university and a kind of return to Rameanmethod is also presaged in Thorndike and Ebbinghauss use of visual and diagrammaticrepresentation in the form of curves of practice and forgetting. Like the student whoselearning is installed in the network of transmission, reproduction and generation, newmedia for charting learning are able to generate and transmit this information

endogeneously within the system. Updatable in real time, these live visualizations oflearning performance have the potential to be transmitted directly to the student,allowing him or her to maximize performance efficiency on the spot. Writing on Internettechnology and school reform in Educational Psychology almost one hundred years afterThorndike, one researcher imagines:

Data generated as learners use [specialized networked software] can beanalyzed, aggregated within and across episodes and learners, and reported backto all parties engaged in school reform with a very short delay. In the same way asmy stock portfolio can be updated every 20 min[utes], learners, teachers, andresearchers can have data upon which to make on-the-spot adaptations. (Winne,

2006, 14)Computers and their multimedia capabilities allow the student to not only see how theirpractice may have improved over time, but also to chart it as they perform, closing thesystemic loop by providing a kind of adaptive and instantaneous bio-feedback.

The university as a media system has indeed come full circle: it is nowprogressing towards a kind of reintegration, on a disciplinary and technological level,through a gradual historical movement of alienation, contradiction and reconciliation,following not the necessity of sprit, but the situation as it is determined by media. Thequestion, of course, is whether the resulting whole is the truth, or whether, with Adorno,we may wonder whether the whole is the untrue (1983, 57).


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Friesen and Cressman - Kittlereducation

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